Android™ Dev Insight

Android UI: Vintage Thermometer – Code Update

Aug 4th, 2010 at 1:35 pm

After I had posted the original article about making a vintage Android thermometer, it became popular very quickly and I was really surprised how useful some people found it. The code I wrote for that article was meant as an example, a draft of what you could really do using the techniques described in the post.

Freddy Martens from ATS Tech Lab took that code, improved it and modified it for his needs while creating several industrial automation components based on the improved code of Vintage Thermometer. You can have a look at them here. I recommend reading other articles on their blog as well and keeping an eye on it.
However, what Freddy also did as a big favor for me and for you MTR readers was merging his improvements to the original Vintage Thermometer code without changing its overall functionality. Thanks to that, we now have the following features:

Comments in the code – I myself am not very famous for writing a lot of them

“Magic” numbers extracted as constants (and other things Freddy did to polish the code)

Properties are now available so you can tweak thermometer settings in the layout XML!

I am really excited by what Freddy did, and in general how we can collaborate within the community and benefit each other. This kind of interaction is what brings life to the platform biosphere. This is what I’m doing MTR for.